By Jennifer Keating and Colin MacCabe
5:58 p.m. Bigelow Boulevard, March 18, 2016. Red traffic light, shiny new pickup truck just ahead. Navy blue paint, Pennsylvania plate. A tricolor decorates the top center of the license plate holder. Green. White. Orange. At the bottom, Tiochfaidh Ar La (Our Day Will Come).
In Pittsburgh, Ireland’s revolution still lives. One hundred years after Patrick Pearse declared the birth of the Republic of Ireland, we find the national flag and a Gaelic phrase that represent a century’s violent struggle.
Bobby Sands’ phrase, Tiochfaidh Ar La, emerged in the wake of 10 men dying, as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the Provisional Irish Republican Army engaged in the grimmest of battles. Ten young republicans had starved themselves to death for the right to be treated as political prisoners against a backdrop of police and prison guard assassinations, while civilians and military personnel waged war in the streets of Belfast, Derry, London and Dublin.
If we go back to 1916, we should remember that Pearse and his comrades were a tiny section of those committed to Irish self-rule. The vast majority of young Irish volunteers had marched to war with the British Empire. Pearse knew that his Easter Rising was doomed. But he believed in the sanctity of spilling blood. Three months before the Irish rebellion, Pearse wrote of the carnage in Europe:
“The last 16 months have been the most glorious in the history of Europe. Heroism has come back to the earth. … It is good for the world that such things should be done. The old heart of the world needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battle fields.”
Above all Pearse believed in martyrdom: The national cause demanded young men and women willing to die, whose deaths would be transmitted and broadcast from generation to generation. This was not the age of YouTube or even television. And yet, Pearse understood the poignancy and potency of performance, the ways in which public displays of violence would mobilize support for the nationalist cause.
On Easter Monday, 1916, Dublin was a beautiful Georgian city. Ten days later, when the British artillerymen had finished their work, it was in ruins. As the volunteers were paraded through the streets by their British captors, the crowds jeered and spat at those who had brought modern warfare to their streets.
But then, Pearse’s wish was granted. John Maxwell, the British general commanding the forces in Dublin, executed day-by-day the young men who had led the rebellion. He was so determined to kill them that James Connolly, who had been severely wounded in the fighting, was strapped to a chair to remain upright before the firing squad.
Those who had spat at the volunteers only days before were outraged by this British violence, which reminded everybody of the centuries of oppression, exploitation, starvation and killing which British rule represented in Ireland.
The revolution was in motion. As Pearse had hoped, their martyrdom galvanized the nationalist cause and legitimized both the declaration of a Republic and the use of the gun.
Within two years, Ireland would unanimously elect Sinn Fein members of parliament who would not sit in Westminster but who would form the first Dail (Irish parliament) of the Republic. This came against the backdrop of perhaps the most effective terrorist campaign ever waged before or since, as Michael Collins organized the relentless killing of policemen and special-branch agents in every corner of the country.
It is, however, worth remembering that this astonishing unanimous vote for Sinn Fein was not necessarily to be read as an endorsement of the IRA’s violence. What had galvanized Ireland was the decision by the British government, faced with imminent defeat by the German offensive of April 1918, to introduce conscription in Ireland.
On the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising in 1966, the legacy of violence and the glorification of the gun seemed benign in a country where both had all but disappeared. However, it was these celebrations that led a young Gerry Adams in Belfast to espouse the ideology that would later make him in the next decade the Provisional IRA commander in that city. In those years, Pearse’s glorification of martyrdom and violence gained a terrible new life, as a civil rights campaign in Northern Ireland was squashed by a violent and partisan Royal Ulster Constabulary and a British Army that showed no restraint in harming the citizens it should have protected.
As citizens of Ireland, we believe that, as its 100th anniversary is celebrated, more attention should be paid to the days of its birth.
The terrible history of the North of Ireland in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s must be acknowledged, and its connections to the violence of the Easter Rising are irrefutable. But we should also consider the contemporary phenomenon of Islamist ideology that plays on a public display of violence and which cast a chilling new perspective last week in Brussels. Pearse’s commitment to the centrality of martyrdom and the rejection of Anglo-Saxon modernity in favor of an imagined pure Gaelic past clearly prefigures the use of martyrdom videos and the appeal to an imaginary era of pure sharia law.
These identifications with Islamist ideology are partial. Pearse and Connolly were committed democrats. And they had no program to proselytize outside Ireland. But the centrality of death, a pure image of the past and the public display of violence means that the duty to honor the dead, those men the British shot, does not end with celebrating their heroism.
The Republic they founded has come a very long way. We are incredibly proud that on May 25, 2015, Ireland became the first nation to write gay marriage into its constitution. In 1998, the historic Good Friday Peace Agreement offered an unprecedented brokerage in which the people of the Republic renounced any absolute claim of sovereignty over the six counties of Northern Ireland, which are, in terms of history and geography, part of a single political entity. On many levels, Ireland’s day has come.
For far too long, however, masculinity and the gun have been inextricably fused in an Irish image. It is of vital importance now that Ireland follows the impulse of last year’s campaign that such gender stereotypes become a thing of the past.
In ridding ourselves of these poisonous and deadly images, the United States of America has a very important role to play, too. From the middle of the 19th century on, it is Irish-Americans who have largely provided the funding and the ideological justification for the gun in Irish politics.
Three-thousand miles and more from the reality of Ireland, it has been all too easy to broadcast images of death and martyrdom as a romantic notion of politics. For many Irish-Americans, their ethnic identity is linked to a confluence of sacrifice and heroism, a posture made possible by physical remove from the lived experience of contemporary Irish politics. This is a sentiment neatly articulated in a license plate holder on an American pickup truck just last week on Bigelow Boulevard.
And yet, there are countervailing elements. Pittsburgh’s own Dan Rooney was a distinguished U.S. ambassador to Ireland and for peace, and George Mitchell was the essential broker of the 1998 peace agreement. Pittsburgh has played host to hundreds of Northern Irish youth through the Wider Horizons program for over 30 years.
But for Ireland to be finally rid of this tradition of violence, all Irish-Americans must engage much more seriously with the history of their country of origin. And recognize that this country has come of age.
Jennifer Keating is assistant dean for educational initiatives at Carnegie Mellon University’s Dietrich College for Humanities and Social Science. Colin MacCabe is Distinguished Professor of English and Film at the University of Pittsburgh.
